Prayer

I have my own way of thinking about prayer, that it is much more of an alignment than an activity. I pray best when my heart aligns with God himself and the moment his interests begin to dictate my own. In this way, prayer consists largely of listening, granting space and thought to what the Father wants. Along the way, my prayer life becomes my life, and every thought translates into divine dialogue. I love the way Buechner paints it:

"We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. The "Ah-h-h-h!" that sometimes floats up out of us as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to ourselves, but to something even more familiar than ourselves and even more strange than the world."